anomalizer.net thorugh the years

First cut (2004)

In the beginning, there was just arvind.name. It started off with me wanting a "arvind.something" domain name. At that point, I had no idea of what I wanted to do a with a website. Now that I had a domain name, I tried buying some hosting space. The hosting company was terrible with lots of outages, no response to support requests and a takeover towards the end. My knowledge of HTML was not of any consequence. I'd heard all over that frames was a bad design but that's the only way I could see doing what I wanted to do. So I ended up creating a rather gross looking MS Frontpage generated frames based site with almost zero content. I had something about threaded programming and that was pretty much the only content on the site. I tried having photos and chose gallery. Overall, it was so pathetic that the internet archive does not even know it.

Enter the anomalizer (2005)

After terrible hosting experience, I became overly concerned about support. By then, I had some experience with putting out content on the internet thanks to livejournal. A lot of people I knew had their hosting that at symonds with particualrly good reviews. So I decided to move there. By then, I also wanted a site that looked a little more respectable. My knowledge of PHP was close to zero and that of javascript was completely zero. So I ended up generating some page using dreamweaver; modified it in php to support dynamic menus. Overall, it was still working by accident. By now, I at least had some traffic. I still felt the moral obligation to have a photo album and tried coppermine. The main problem with it was the constant security vulerabilities. Secondly, I could never get it to have the same theme as the rest of the site. Towards the end, I started blaming the lack of PHP 5 for not maintaining the site. Relatively speaking, it did have some content. Nuff said!

anomalizer.net 2.0 (2007)

At some point, the web 2.0 thing happened. I'm not quite sure what that means in terms of technology. Heck, I don't even know what AJAX means for sure. What I know is that if you have to fleece the masses (and appeal to Vice Preisdents of large clueless corporations in particular), you need say that you are doing something 2.0. To make things convinient, I started using the domain anomalizer.net only from the second version of my site, so I can pass this off as 2.0

This time around, I think I am fairly conversant with PHP. I also have some idea of semantic markup, progressive enhancement, javascript, CSS and SEO. This time aorund, the photo storage shall be around flickr. The biggest challenge will be around what to write here v/s what to write on my blog. Clearly there are some things that will go here obviosuly but I cannot say the same about the blog. Jeff Boulter is right in saying that "Because personal homepages are so 1997". After much thought, I decided against using any content management or templating software written in PHP.